a friday afternoon

Another big holiday weekend coming up. Almost half the year is holidays, I swear. Kyiv might be really busy this weekend or really dead. Being coming to the city to celebrate or people leaving the city to celebrate. Really, it could go either way.

In the middle here--Kyiv and really any adjacent oblast--and our Ukrainian language skills kinda fall outta favor. They can get us around. We can od what we need to do, but the lingua franca is definitely Russian. And I can get around even in Russian. Can do what I need, just from what I've picked up from the Surjik (a blend of Ukrainian and Russian) I hear. But I am much more comfortable in pure/almost-pure Ukrainian.

Living in the West as we did, we rarely heard Russian in large doses. Just on TV, which we didn't watch very often. Our langauge usually came from talking or reading, and most of that was in Ukrainian. It got to where I was even thinking in Ukrainian.

So we're glad to be headed back out to the west. We're having a good time in Kyiv, taking in some theatre (Don Quixote ballet, translated into a ballet--PHENOMENAL), visiting the touristy places in town, and taking a much needed rest. We saw Hetman Ivan Mazepa's house yesterday. And today, being the dorks that we are, are attending a seminar in downtown Kyiv being given by Peter Master. He'll be talking about how to teach the English article system in a more coherent way.

Like I said: dorks.

Before that, we'll prolly head over to the underground monasteries.

Yeah, life.